Ask Betty

Think you should buy that dress? Think again.

Bergdorf Goodman has been dressing New York’s one per cent for more than a century—a hundred and eleven years, to be precise. The venerable retailer, on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-eighth Street, is celebrating that odd anniversary—chosen for its graphic symbolism: “one store” (Bergdorf has no branches), “one experience, one city”—with a season’s worth of hoopla. It began in September, with the screening of a lavishly produced, ninety-minute documentary, “Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s,” directed by Matthew Miele. The title was taken from the caption of a cartoon by Victoria Roberts, which ran in The New Yorker in 1990. It pictures an old biddy cheerfully instructing a friend how to dispose of her remains. The conceit, Roberts told Miele, “wouldn’t have worked with Macy’s.”

Betty Halbreich, one of Bergdorf’s most senior employees—she joined the staff in 1976—appears only briefly in the film, though her peppery candor relieves its blandness. After the screening, she was mobbed by admirers, but she also wondered if she would have a job in the morning. Halbreich runs Betty Halbreich’s Solutions, a personal-shopping service based in a suite—a corner office overlooking Central Park, and two private dressing rooms—on Bergdorf’s third floor. She is a petite dynamo of eighty-five, with a svelte figure and a throaty laugh. Her grooming (artful makeup, short silver hair) and style of dress (sober tailoring, playful accessories) advertise the kind of secure identity that she helps her clients to project. “My work is like lay therapy,” Halbreich told me. “You listen, you prescribe—clothes are a fix—and you hold up a mirror. Most people can’t see themselves.”

That evening, Halbreich was wearing a vintage tuxedo jacket by Issey Miyake, a Gucci blouse in animal-print chiffon, and, “for pizzazz,” a bejewelled leopard brooch that had belonged to her mother. Sensible shoes and a good panty girdle are the only concessions that she makes to age. Her tolerance for constraint, however, seems limited to latex. Isaac Mizrahi was one of several fashion grandees who told Miele a typical “Betty story.” He had heard her talking a client out of a dress, then abruptly changing her mind. “Buy it,” she told the woman. “It’s not as terrible as what you came in with.”

Halbreich’s bluntness is not universally applauded. An important buyer described her to me as “a curmudgeon.” “Certain people are scared of me,” Halbreich admitted, “and I probably can’t help them.” Psychoanalysis may be cheaper, though there is neither a charge for Halbreich’s time nor a minimum-purchase requirement. Yet, for those who prefer tough love to servility, her office is ecumenical. Arrivistes alternate in the dressing room with the grandes dames they aspire to become, and athletes’ wives follow oligarchs. Some of her regulars are women who, like Jo Carole Lauder, the art collector and philanthropist, “just don’t like to shop,” as Lauder told me. Others—media stars, corporate executives—don’t have the time. Mothers send Halbreich their teen-age daughters, often for the same reason that my mother enrolled me in driving school. Strivers upgrading their wardrobe for a promotion—in the boardroom or at the altar—invest in Halbreich’s expertise, though on that score she has a “strict policy,” she says. “I don’t take the second wife if I’ve dressed the first one, and I don’t take the mistress.” Three of her best clients, however, are widows of the same man.

Even the buyer critical of Halbreich’s manners lauded her “eye.” (She possesses a matched pair, green and unclouded, which size you up, in all senses.) The costume designer Patricia Field, who shopped with her to dress Carrie Bradshaw and her friends on “Sex and the City,” considers Halbreich a fellow-stylist. “Stylist is the new wannabe profession,” Field said. “There are lots of studio services around”—shoppers who work in film and television—“but she’s the go-to celebrity. She’s also the most fun.”

Halbreich estimates that about half her revenues are generated by fashion professionals. (Field sometimes “pulled” a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise for a single episode of “Sex and the City.”) She has also collaborated on Woody Allen films, with the costume designers Santo Loquasto and Jeffrey Kurland, and on Broadway plays, with William Ivey Long, Ann Roth, and Jane Greenwood. Field’s former protégé Eric Daman worked with Halbreich on the clothes for “Gossip Girl.” Candice Bergen, Meryl Streep, Stockard Channing, Joan Rivers, and Liza Minnelli are among her alumnae. Mia Farrow was the rare actress who balked at a dress—“a little hundred-dollar Adele Simpson number, so that dates the story,” Halbreich recalled. “She said it would have fed a village in Biafra.”

Soap operas cycle through more clothes than a laundromat, so they have always been lucrative for Solutions, especially “All My Children,” which ran for some forty years. (Susan Lucci, who played the glamorous villain, is also a private client.) In good times, Halbreich reckons, her office racks up annual sales of two to three million dollars, but, she added, “I ought to write a chapter for my memoirs called ‘All My Recessions.’ ” The memoir, Halbreich’s second book, is in the works. In 1997, she published “Secrets of a Fashion Therapist,” a volume of advice “for the ladies from Dubuque”—not flyover sophisticates—on “shopping for the truth.”

Last June, at eight-thirty on a sweltering morning, ninety minutes before Bergdorf opened its main doors to the public, Halbreich was waiting for me at the employees’ entrance, next to the Paris Theatre, on West Fifty-eighth Street. When the security guard asked to see my I.D., Halbreich gave her a cockeyed look. “I’m her I.D.,” she said, and we waltzed through to the elevators. She had invited me to “walk the store” with her—all eight floors—a ritual that she performs at the beginning of every workday. “It’s how I get a feel for what’s new, because I don’t read fashion magazines,” she said. Tapping her head, she added, “And this is my computer.”

Bergdorf’s ground floor blazes with the opulence of its mirrors and chandeliers, but also with that of its merchandise, mostly jewelry and leather goods. A whimsical, beaded minaudière from Judith Leiber costs about as much (four thousand dollars) as a crocodile tote by Nancy Gonzalez. The upper stories have an amenity rare in New York: natural light on three sides. Five is a riot of noise and color, where the youthful wares of edgier designers compete for attention like the rugs in a souk. Halbreich hesitates to take clients there, she said, “unless they are twelve, but I’ll bring Five to them.” On the floors below, decorum is the rule (except during sales, when even Bergdorf turns into Fort Lauderdale). The aisles are flanked with richly appointed little chapels dedicated to a chosen saint (Chanel, Lanvin, Balenciaga). A hierarchy of prestige, like that among the dining rooms on a cruise ship, seems to govern the placement of Old Guard, newish-guard, and avant-garde designers.

Halbreich is “blind and deaf” to the siren call of a label. She sailed past a rack of Prada raincoats, in a drab palette. “Deluxe prison garb,” she sniffed. A ruffled poet’s blouse, by Alexander McQueen, was askew on its hanger. She jiggled it briefly, then put it back: “There’s always a reason something is marked down.” Alaïa’s seams earned her approval: “I’m a nut for cut,” she added, but “spare me the maid’s-room pink.” A “shepherdess” dress, in a floral print, by Jean Paul Gaultier, reminded her of Sarah Ferguson’s daughter—“the blowsier one.”

Whenever Halbreich paused to inspect a garment, she patted it down like a horse breeder at a yearling sale, checking for the flaws in an expensive animal. “How will it look when you walk or sit? How good is the fabric? What’s the taste level?” After an instructive detour into the stockrooms (an alternative reality of concrete floors, fluorescent light, and rolling racks behind metal cages), we paused at The Row’s fall pre-collection. The line is designed by the Olsen twins, and made in America. “If I have one prejudice,” Halbreich said, “it’s that I try to push brands manufactured here.” A burgundy cashmere turtleneck “spoke” to her, though only after she had rubbed a sleeve on the underside of her chin. “Let’s take it back with us,” she said. “It looks like you, very Left Bank.” The sweater wasn’t something I would have leaped at. When I tried it on, though, I was smitten by its silhouette—cropped and belled, with narrow armholes. “You’re just necking with it,” she warned me, as she checked the price tag and grimaced like a Kabuki actor at its four digits. “You’re not going all the way on my watch.”

Halbreich has lived in Manhattan long enough—for sixty-five years—to pass for a native. Patricia Field notes, “The wisecracks, the attitude, that El Morocco voice are all out of Damon Runyon.” (Runyon’s ashes were scattered on Broadway.) But Betty, née Stoll, was born in Chicago, in the heyday of Al Capone. Her father was a businessman who “ran department stores,” Halbreich said. After his early death, her mother, Carol, had to reinvent herself, and she bought a bookshop on Oak Street, on the city’s Gold Coast, “where she roped in interesting people, who stayed for hours. My mother’s real vocation was running a salon.”

Carol was famous for her hats, her jewelry, and her repartee. She may or may not have gone swimming in the Plaza fountain on a visit to Manhattan. She “smoked like a chimney,” Halbreich said (and so did she, until a bout with cancer). In old age, Carol wore Pucci and Montana. She wasn’t a beauty, yet men adored her. Viktor Skrebneski, the fashion photographer, was among her cavaliers. “He flew her around the world,” Halbreich said. (They travelled with his longtime partner.)

Betty, too, adored her mother, but was somewhat overshadowed by her flamboyance. She wanted to become a painter or, better, a cartoonist, and she went to lectures at the Art Institute of Chicago. She married at twenty, however, before her ambitions had coalesced. (It was 1947, the year Dior launched his New Look; Halbreich had several original Diors in her trousseau.)

Sonny Halbreich was the real Runyon character, a dashing man who liked a good time. He owned a company in the garment district, called Uwana Wash Frocks, which manufactured drip-dry housecoats and bathrobes. (They weren’t sold at Bergdorf.) Every season, he would ask his wife’s opinion of the new designs, and, on the remote chance that she liked something, he knew that his customers wouldn’t, so he pulled it from the line.

The Halbreichs had two children, Kathy and John, who are now in their early sixties. Kathy is the associate director of the Museum of Modern Art; John went into his father’s business, and still works in the fashion industry, at a company that manufactures women’s sleepwear. “We’re a high-low family,” he told me. “My sister runs the museum, and Mom was selling couture while Dad and I were servicing J. C. Penney.” Kathy Halbreich said, “A clothes sense like my mother’s is an artistic gift for experiment and composition, and I don’t think it can be taught. She would have made a great curator—though, in a sense, she is one.”

Halbreich’s children both suggested that their mother’s image of devil-may-care privilege and assurance is deceptive. “She’s very good at the social part,” John said, “and she’s close friends with many of her clients. But she works in a corporate climate that didn’t exist at Bergdorf when she started, and she has to make the sale.” Kathy observed, “My mother likes to say, ‘Everybody is the same without their clothes on,’ by which she means, I think, that we’re all vulnerable. Her buoyance of spirit is the product of a lifelong struggle, because she really understands melancholy.”

Halbreich went through a particularly melancholy period in the early nineteen-seventies, when her marriage was ending. “I forgave my husband many things,” she said, “but I had a limit.” She emerged, with the help of therapy, from “a doll-house existence,” and found seasonal work in a series of designer showrooms on Seventh Avenue. Then Geoffrey Beene, whom she revered, and who wrote the foreword to her first book—“She enriches our lives”—hired her for a full-time sales job. But, once it was clear that the break with Sonny was irrevocable, she “couldn’t get up in the morning,” she told me. She eventually met a “good companion,” who died four years ago, but a portrait of the Halbreichs as radiant newlyweds still hangs in her bedroom.

Chance meetings are a motif in Halbreich’s biography. She had met Sonny in Miami Beach, while on vacation with her mother. She met Ira Neimark, Bergdorf’s former C.E.O., while lunching with her mother at the Drake Hotel, in Chicago. Neimark and Dawn Mello, the company’s former fashion director, were at the next table. “When Ira saw me, he thought I was chic,” Halbreich recalled. “ ‘Get that girl,’ he said.”

The “girl,” who was then forty-nine, was hired for a boutique that Beene had opened at Bergdorf. Halbreich had never worked a register, and she hated the sales floor. “I think you can do better with me,” she told her bosses, after a year. “Let’s set up a personal-shopping service.” But the management wanted to see her in action, so they gave her a “test case”: the immortally stylish Babe Paley. “It wasn’t much of a test, since she was only looking at Givenchy,” Halbreich said. “But I had the nerve to ask her what brand of hair rinse she used.” (She allegedly used Tintex, a cheap fabric dye.)

Personal shoppers are now ubiquitous, and some are the algorithms that track your preferences on Net-a-Porter or Amazon. Lord & Taylor, in New York, and Marshall Field’s, in Chicago, both claim to have been, in the early twentieth century, the first department store to offer one-on-one service. Halbreich created her own niche at Bergdorf, but, when she started, she had two rivals. (There are several more today.) One, she said, was a snob for French couture who spent her days on the phone, and the other catered exclusively to “the carriage trade” in an era when women of all classes were entering the workforce. “We had no office that really took care of people. There’s a lot of pretension in this racket, but there’s nothing glorified about what you do. It’s a helping profession, with its menial aspects. You get nannies for your clients, even a date once in a while, and you listen to their woes. Oh, the stories these walls could tell.”

Later on the morning of our walkabout, a young woman met us in the Solutions office. Olivia (not her real name) is a second-generation Halbreich client who had agreed to let me tag along on one of her shopping sessions. She is tall, poised, and voluptuous—a modern Gibson Girl.

Halbreich: “You have a very expensive figure.”

Olivia: “What is an expensive figure?”

Halbreich: “Too womanly to go jeune fille.”

Olivia: “That’s fine with me, because I dress older than my age. My ideal is head-to-toe Saint Laurent from the seventies.”

Olivia told us that she “didn’t really need anything—my closets are full.” But at our first stop, in the handbag department, she fell upon a Celine tote, reduced to fourteen hundred dollars, and would have bought it on the spot. “You’re going to think about it,” Halbreich said firmly. She also scotched Olivia’s request to stop at the shoe salon. “You mean the candy store? I’ll never get you out of there.”

Some clients visit Halbreich every season, when the collections arrive. Olivia and her mother come less often, and usually not together. “Our styles are too different for jubilant co-shopping,” she said. “But I care about clothes less and less as I get older.” To which Halbreich replied, “You could have fooled me.”

We took the escalator to the fifth floor, and, as we worked our way down, I noticed a pattern. Olivia thought of her taste as “conservative.” “You have your square days,” Halbreich agreed. “I don’t want my clothes to attract attention,” Olivia said. (Her job involves diplomacy.) Yet she made a beeline for a racy sheath by Andrew Gn—black lace over nude chiffon, then an Alaïa ballerina dress, with tiers of crocheted ruffles (“Not with your behind, kid”), and a short Milly skirt, in a loud print, with flounces and a peplum. “It might look better than it ought to,” Halbreich conceded, “at least to your boyfriend.” Olivia parried the teasing, which she seemed to enjoy, but I thought she was going to cry when Halbreich asked the saleswoman for the Milly “in a size 10.”

Halbreich sounds curmudgeonly only on the screen or the page, where you can’t feel her visceral warmth. She isn’t really a tyrant; she just doesn’t pretend. And a client’s fancy is the wind in her sails, so she tacks when she has to. As Olivia’s choices piled up, Halbreich draped the garments over her arm. (Eric Daman told me that even with him, a buff male forty-two years her junior, “Betty insists on the heavy lifting.”) But she added her own “pulls” to the mix, sometimes surreptitiously. There was a pattern there, too. She was dressing a statuesque figure with inspired severity; she was interpreting the adjective “conservative” as “patrician”; and she was reformatting Olivia’s ideal of old Saint Laurent in the military swank of a jacket by Burberry, a Japanese print by Dries van Noten, and, in the day’s pièce de résistance, The Row’s “Left Bank” sweater. “I ask my clients to trust me,” Halbreich said, on our way back to the dressing room, “but not to believe me. For that, we have a three-way mirror.”

Halbreich suggested that our next meeting should take place at her apartment—she wanted to give me “the closet tour.” (John Halbreich had described his mother’s closets as “the Vatican library of vintage.”) When she came to the door, on the appointed evening, I was somewhat surprised to find her in a black T-shirt and leggings, with a pair of moccasins. Below the neck, she looked about seventeen. “What’s your poison?” she said, rattling the ice cubes in her glass like a maraca. She has lived in the same labyrinthine apartment on Park Avenue since her son was born. We threaded our way to an old-fashioned kitchen with poppy wallpaper and the original appliances. (“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But it’s a rental, so don’t break it.”) As she was pouring a vodka, I noticed some linens in the freezer. That might be a bad sign for an octogenarian who isn’t Halbreich. “I freeze anything that I have to iron,” she explained, “which is everything. It’s a great trick, because the damp cold works better than starch.” Halbreich’s children once gave her what John calls “the Golden Sponge Award” for fanatical housekeeping.

You could not describe Halbreich’s décor as soberly tailored. The den is panelled in knotty cypress (“big in the fifties”), with pink chintz upholstery (“It used to be tartan”). The master bedroom has gingham walls and needlepoint rugs. There is a laundry suite, and a walk-in closet dedicated to Christmas decorations. In the formal dining room (Wedgwood-blue walls, opaline-glass chandelier, antique breakfront groaning with heirloom china), Halbreich’s banquet table was set for two. “I made us a little supper,” she said. “You always look like you need a good meal.”

After the cheese course, we started with the drawers in a massive bureau, where silk flowers and scarves, Bakelite “bug pins,” wooden bangles and beads, evening bags in toile sleeves, gloves from Florence and Paris, monogrammed handkerchiefs, chunky stone necklaces, silver pens and pillboxes, clip-on earrings, and her mother’s jewels all have separate compartments. Then came the clothes. Each of her closets (perhaps a dozen—I lost count) is a deep stall with high ceilings, sturdy poles along both sides, and, above them, shelving. The larger stalls might accommodate a Lipizzaner, with its tack. Their heavy doors are fitted with custom-made wooden shoe racks that open like a steamer trunk.

Halbreich organizes her wardrobe the way Bergdorf does its merchandise: by season, function, and style. Vintage evening wear has its own closet; sweaters are arranged by weight and color. Her summer day clothes were in the hall outside her bedroom, and every padded hanger had breathing room, “so the grabbing is easy.” She explained, “I dress like a fireman, in about seven minutes.” When the season changes, the woollens estivating in the apartment’s hinterlands get pride of place. Twice a year, at the sartorial solstice, she empties every closet, triages its contents (“You wouldn’t believe what I’ve given away—Jean Muirs!”), and cleans it with her golden sponge. It’s an Augean labor.

My own closets are a study in senseless hoarding, and I told Halbreich that she had taught me the importance of knowing what you possess. “That’s life,” she said. ♦

Judith Thurman began contributing to The New Yorker in 1987, and became a staff writer in 2000.